Two years ago at E3, the teams at DICE and Visceral Games were eager to spoil the announcement of their first-ever game-making collaboration. At the time, staffers from each company privately hinted about their creation and its huge stress on multiplayer. At one party, we nearly coerced drunken Visceral designers to spill the secret, but they only spilled their drinks.

The devs managed to keep their lips sealed about the shape of Battlefield Hardline, the cops-and-robbers spin-off of EA's biggest military franchise, though the momentum of their announcement was nearly stalled by a leak two weeks ago. Somehow, today's full, official reveal rekindled the excitement and then some.

Monday's EA press conference contained early peeks at Star Wars Battlefront and entries in the Mass Effect and Mirror's Edge series, but Battlefield Hardline managed to elicit the biggest cheers, possibly because of its beautifully choreographed gameplay reveal. Shortly afterward, EA put its helicopters where its mouth was, revealing a huge line of PS4 consoles hosting the game's live beta.

We wanted to see how the real thing compared, and while the perfectly timed bombast and invincible lead criminal of the demo were more astounding, we walked away from Hardline genuinely impressed. Battlefield has consistently attempted to shoehorn Call of Duty-esque, quick-burst combat into its open-world, vehicle-loaded formula, usually in the form of underwhelming DLC. But here, the combined forces of DICE and Visceral have instead leapfrogged CoD's tired formula with a city-driven, cash-loaded twist.

We started in the game's "Heist" mode, which was the same as in the presentation. This asymmetrical mode sees a team of robbers combing a battleground—in this case, downtown Los Angeles—looking for a few vaults loaded with cash and valuables. Police officers must stop the criminal squad from setting off explosives and taking the cash, or stop them along the way at various drop-off points, before the criminals eventually get the final cache into a getaway helicopter.

On its face, Hardline doesn't stray from Battlefield's general formula, especially in terms of highly potent weapons. For starters, since when was LA overrun with arms dealers thick in rocket launchers? Both sides also get to pick from classes and loadouts, though instead of upgrades based on experience points and grinding, Hardline appears to hinge more on an in-game cash system. You accumulate cash during each mission to stock up on mid-combat upgrades like better vehicles, zipline hooks, and "non-lethal" taser equipment (which proved surprisingly effective at dispatching foes).

The secret sauce, at least in today's demo, was how Heist mode forced players into high-octane, group-loaded paths to protect (or recover) loads of cash. Getting from point A to point B in any Battlefield game can take a variety of paths, but you'll need a motorcade, mixed with motorcycles and gun-loaded SUVs to do so effectively this time around. The game appears to be built from the ground up to host skyscraper-loaded cityscapes, blown-up freeways, and beautiful, high-action paths that make us most excited about losing hours to its multiplayer mode.

The other mode revealed today, "Blood Money," is a more traditional "protect your turf" mode, asking players to raid a central vault and return its cash to your home base. The catch is that you can also hide by your foes' base, kill any of its thieves, and ferry that cash back home (or pick up cash from dead bodies along the way). This symmetrical mode felt a little more staid, but we liked it as a cool twist on Call of Duty's "Kill Confirmed" mode.

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In terms of performance, we only saw the game run on PlayStation 4 consoles today. While it didn't stick to the "60 frames a second" promise from its developers, that's more forgivable in beta form. Explosions and particle effects weren't quite up to the PC footage in the eye-bulging demo, but the series' trademark collapsible set-pieces still blew up very nicely.

Really, the biggest shame about this game is that it didn't preempt the launch of last year's Battlefield 4, which was marred with incremental updates, a sorry solo campaign, and horribly broken multiplayer servers. This demo felt like refinement, not total overhaul, and we have to wonder whether it could have launched as a BF4 expansion pack instead. Still, this is a Battlefield experience we could get hooked on, having been worn out a bit by the open-prairie, run-for-kilometers stuff of the past two entries. We'll be eager to test our optimism come October 21.